Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday March 12, 2012 @03:33PM
from the bet-the-insurance-is-high-on-that-thing dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have managed to perfect 3D printing at the nanoscale. What may look like a grain of sand to the human eye could in fact be a detailed racing car model, a reproduction of a famous church, or London Bridge. The 3D printer relies on a laser beam directed by mirrors through a liquid resin onto a surface. It can print at 5 meters per second, which is a world record, and the end result is only a few hundred nanometers in size. The next hurdle: printing with bio-material so we can start making our own body parts/organs."

The ONLY reason I clicked on this link and went to see the story is that I thought it was a real race car printed on a 3d printer with a laser. I didn't even care to see the shark that the laser was attached to./. tricked me at looking into TFA and I find it abhorrent, absolutely unacceptable behaviour on the part of/. - tricking people to click on TFA link.

Oh, it's not a real car, did I mention that?

Nano car. Crap.

Though you more likely meant:

This product is not yet being sold to raise money for ron paul, therefore it is evil and abhorrent. I must hate it even though it has done nothing bad to me. All hail lord ron paul.

Perhaps you accidentally swallowed a small nano model of something when you were trying to drink more kool-aid? That might explain why you forgot to pledge eternal unquestioning allegiance to your lord and savior in your post.

I was hoping maybe the printer was also tiny. I live in a tiny apartment and a nano scale printer would be awesome. I'd love to have a 3d printer at home, but so far they all seem to be big counter hogs.

It's stretching it a bit to call it nano-scale. The legend on the images puts the models in the region of 100um. 0.1mm is not really nano-scale, unless the hair on our head is nano-scale. With around 200 lines per layer, we're still talking about hundreds of nanometers for the print resolution.

as said in the OP, details in TFA suggests resolution is hundreds of nanometers. If NASA/ESA came up with a picture of the moons surface with half kilometer resolution, you wouldn't call it meter scale

The printer isn’t slow, either. In just 4 minutes it can print 100 layers consisting of 200 lines per layer. That translates into five meters of polymer printed in one second, which is actually a world record.

So 20,000 lines in 240 seconds comes out to 83.3 lines/sec, making each line 60 mm wide? Either I'm misunderstanding (always a strong possibility) or there's a typo there somewhere.